Chipotle and Zipline Form ‘Zipotle’ to Provide Aerial Food Delivery

Some Chipotle customers will soon get to choose between meals delivered by land or air.

The Mexican fast casual restaurant announced Thursday (Aug. 21) that it was teaming with autonomous delivery company Zipline to fly customers’ digital orders to locations in the greater Dallas area.

A small number of Zipline users now have access to the program the companies are calling “Zipotle,” with plans for an expanded launch in the weeks ahead.

“With Zipline, you tap a button, and minutes later food magically appears – hot, fresh, and ultra-fast,” Zipline Co-founder and CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton said in a news release.

“Starting today, families in the Dallas area can have food delivered by Zipotle and served for lunch or dinner. What once felt like science fiction is soon going to become totally normal.”

The program lets customers make an order with Chipotle, where workers will then place an order into a Zipping Point, which allows the aircraft — known as a Zip — to autonomously pick up the order.

“After flying to its destination, the aircraft will hover about 300 feet in the air, while the Zip lowers to the ground,” the release added. “The Zip automatically avoids obstacles and gently and precisely places the order at the guest’s address.”

As the release notes, Zipline began by making autonomous deliveries of medical products to rural hospitals in Rwanda and now serves roughly 5,000 hospitals and health facilities worldwide. The company says it has also completed more than 1.6 million commercial deliveries, with someone getting a Zipline delivery every 60 seconds.

This range of services is the future of robotic delivery, Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani told PYMNTS in an interview earlier this year.

He envisioned offering “reverse logistics” services, using the delivery bots to return products for customers, as well as for local commerce. In this scenario, the robots would pick up clothing or shoes from local stores and deliver them for customers to try on, letting shoppers keep the ones they want while putting the others back in the bot to return.

“There’s a lot of other things we can do with these robots once they’re out there,” Kashani said. “They’re making the cost of last mile substantially lowered.”

The Chipotle/Zipline partnership is happening at a time when the U.S government is looking to integrate drones into the national airspace, a potential boon for the delivery industry. Current rules require operators to get individual waivers for flights that go beyond the drone operator’s direct line of visual sight.